A Man Called Horse

1825. John Morgan, an English aristocrat hunting in Dakota territory, is captured in a Sioux raid. For years he is treated as livestock. He has no name; they call him horse. As he learns the language he understands that the only route to standing inside the band runs through an ordeal. Elliot Silverstein directs. Richard Harris plays Morgan and Dame Judith Anderson plays Buffalo Cow Head, the old woman of the band. The source is a short story by Dorothy M. Johnson. Unusually for its moment the film speaks Lakota and works hard at the texture of daily life. But its most discussed scene, the suspension by wooden skewers through the chest, is not Sioux at all. It was lifted from the Okipa ceremony of the Mandan and installed as Sioux practice. The instant that looks most authentic is the one that is anthropologically wrong. Even so, its claim to take Native culture seriously shifted what a western could be, and it produced two sequels, The Return of a Man Called Horse and Triumphs of a Man Called Horse. Who it is for: viewers curious about the point in the seventies when the western began interrogating itself. Who it is not for: the story still ends with a white man saving the tribe. If that pattern grates, the film does not live up to its own claim.